Thursday, February 06, 2014

Stan Dragland, Deep Too

Michael comes back to
the table where I’m waiting with my cue. He’s chuckling & shaking his head.
“There was this guy at one of the other urinals in there,” he says, “‘Sure is
cold,’ the guy said, & I said, ‘What’s cold?’ & he said, ‘ No, no, you’re
supposed to say & deep too. I know that,’ he said, ‘because I run the
place.’”

There’s
a strange quality to Newfoundland writer Stan Dragland’s lyric essay Deep Too (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), a
book that exists in the striking creative non-fiction blur between essay and
memoir. Composed in self-contained fragments that accumulate, the book opens with
a dick joke, and turns into a prose exploration of dick jokes, movies, bathroom
stalls and the competitive male swagger, while bringing in references to Sling Blade, Margaret Atwood, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Lyle
Lovett, Dr. Jekyll, Thomas Hardy, Doctor
Faustus, The Brass Rack, George Bowering, Rwanda, the Man from Nantucket and
Out of Sight, among others.

Maybe this started off
as a riff on the joke in Sling Blade.
I hadn’t yet seen the film, so I made no connection. I could now, but then I just
thought, well, deep & deeper – here’s a civilized philosophical discourse,
& it means a much higher literary standard than most material found in a
Men’s. A lot of that stuff comes from well south of Nantucket.

I chuckled to myself,
then rejoined my table-mates & recited what I’d read. One of them confessed
to writing it – he & a friend. How tiny is St. John’s, anyway, you ask. Well,
comes the answer, I’m always running into people I know in vaster Toronto, so
let’s just say Coincidence Rules.

Dragland
has long been one of my favourite non-fiction writers, exploring literature in
such a way that one can’t help but be immediately drawn into his ever-expanding
conversation, sharp observations and lyric connections. Through bringing in
such a range of references and stories, he manages to make incredible connections
and observations that would have been impossible any other way. Previous of his
titles that have struck to the point of rereading some half dozen times or more
include Journeys Through Bookland and
Other Passages (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984),Apocrypha: Further Journeys (Edmonton AB: writer as critic series, NeWest
Press, 2003) and the more recent Stormy Weather: Foursomes (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2005). Structured in three
parts (“There was no Part 2 until my buddy Phil Hall read down to the sausage
& said, ‘I think this has somewhere else to go.’”), Deep Too manages to be conversational, critical, meandering and
straight to the point, presenting an easygoing and complex exploration of
something most others would have easily dismissed out-of-hand. What appeals about this small essay/memoir, as in much of Dragland’s critical work, is in
how he doesn’t provide over answers, but a series of directions, slipping
answers, queries and other observations quietly in. “‘They’re all the same
size,’ Beth says. I have the feeling that she & her cohort of feminists
were counselled to say that to their men. If you’re going to consort with males
at all, they’d have been warned, be very aware that they’re highly sensitive
about size.” Close to the end, he includes a poem by Laura Apol, a volunteer
worker in Rwanda, who composed a poem-as-memorial from some of the savagery she
witnessed during and after the genocide. What has this to do with a dick joke? Possibly
nothing; you might just have to read the book to find out. Dragland writes:

The poem ends with an
admission: people like Laura, like me, are privileged. We may choose not to
look. If we do, we can still head home to Arkansas or Michigan or Newfoundland
& put what we’ve seen behind us. Retreat to what Laura elsewhere calls “the
amnesia / I call home.” But she & I know Atwood is right. Someone has to
see things so shocking that, even in the encounter at second- or third-hand
most of us want to turn away. “Try not to resist the third eye,” she says, “it
knows what it’s doing. Leave it alone and it will show you that this truth is
not the only truth.” That much we know, though it bears repeating. And the
reward for non-resistance? “One day you will wake up and everything, the stones
by the driveway, the brick houses, each brick, each leaf of each tree, your own
body, will be glowing from within, lit up, so bright you can hardly look. You will
reach out in any direction and you will touch the light itself.”

My heart rises to that.
It leaps at those living words for a clarity and a faith I haven’t achieved
& never expect to.